Early June was a little cold for sleeping out. Especially when you got into the high ground of the Cascades. Especially when you didn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag, or even a blanket.
He stopped for lunch the next day in Idleyld Park. He ate a hamburger, drank a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette, and headed on toward Steamboat. The road hugged the northern bank of the North Fork of the Umpqua River, and about ten miles out of Idleyld it entered the Umpqua National Forest.
The road was rolling and winding, with a noticeable overall upgrade. Running, he used to hate hills; walking, they were less of a hassle, but he could feel them.
Dense stands of mixed evergreens lined both sides of the road. When there was a gap in the trees, or when he reached the top of a rise and could see for some distance, he looked out over rich green forest and saw mountains still crowned with snow. At first he was taking note of each beautiful scene, clicking off mental snapshots, but after an hour or so he stopped noticing the beauty and instead let himself become one with it.
There was very little traffic on the road. He walked on the left, facing oncoming cars, and he stepped off onto the shoulder when a vehicle approached. Around the middle of the afternoon, without any conscious intent, he realized he was giving a wave to passing cars. Most of them waved back. Some of them honked.
He stayed that night at the Modoc Motel in Steamboat. The third day he woke to birdsong outside his window and got an early start. Even with the grade slowing him down he was in Toketee Falls by early afternoon. He had a thick bowl of soup and a couple of sandwiches at a lunch counter run by two women, sisters. They were members of the Worldwide Church of God and their restaurant was closed Saturdays and Sundays. You could smoke, there were ashtrays on the counter and at the three tables, but two hand-lettered signs warned against the use of profanity on the premises.
He lit a cigarette and tried to imagine Kit’s reaction to the signs. It would be verbal, he decided, and no doubt eloquent, and it would probably get the two of them thrown out of the place.
There was a motel on the western edge of Toketee Falls, and a court of tourist cabins farther on, but he didn’t really feel like stopping this early. He had the sisters pack him up a couple of sandwiches and a piece of pound cake, and he bought a candy bar and two packages of salted nuts at the Arco station.
He walked for another couple of hours, taking it slowly now, giving way to the upgrade instead of fighting it, reducing his pace and resting whenever he felt the need. While it was still light he left the road and walked fifty yards or so into the forest. He found a spot where the trees were a little farther apart — you couldn’t really call it a clearing — and he cleared the pine needles from a circle ten feet across. In the center of the circle he arranged pine needles and a few scraps of paper for tinder, then gathered twigs and heavier branches from the forest floor. He brought back several armloads of wood, more than he figured to need, because it would be difficult to replenish the supply in the dark.
The fire caught quickly and burned well. He sat cross-legged in front of it, feeding wood to it, getting half-hypnotized gazing into the flames.
All along his route that day he had passed areas specifically set aside for public camping. For a couple of dollars you got a place to pitch your tent, a barbecue pit with firewood cut and stacked for you, and access to running water and indoor plumbing. Pitching camp on his own like this was probably against regulations, and he was certain he risked a stiff fine with his fire.
He was unworried. He knew he wasn’t going to set the woods on fire, and no one would be able to see flames or smoke from the road.
He ate the food he’d brought, putting aside half a sandwich and a Clark Bar for breakfast. He would have liked coffee, but the spring water in his canteen was no hardship. He tended his fire and breathed fresh air tinged with wood smoke while the sky darkened and the birds quieted down around him.
For perhaps two hours he did nothing but feed branches to the fire and listen to the night sounds of the forest. His mind was still. He barely thought. When his eyelids started to droop he wrapped a spare shirt around his extra pair of jeans for a pillow and stretched out alongside the fire.
When he awoke the sky was light and his fire was cold ashes. He packed up, stomped the ashes to make sure there wasn’t an ember still alive, shouldered his pack and made his way back to the road.
There were several motels in Diamond Lake and he stayed at one called the Fair Harbor Inn. There was a coin-operated washer and dryer alongside the Coke and ice machines, and after he’d taken a long hot shower he got change at the desk and did a load of wash. He sat in a redwood lounge chair beside the pool while each machine in turn went through its cycle.
When he’d put his laundry away he returned to the office and asked the round-shouldered owner where he could get a decent meal. “You don’t have a car,” the man said.
“No.”
“Well, the Blue Bonnet’s real good if you like plain cooking, but it’s about half a mile down the road.”
“I think I can manage that.”
“If you like chili,” the man said, “I’d have to say you can’t go wrong there.”
The chili wasn’t bad. It was a little mild for his taste, but the girl brought him a bottle of Tabasco and that gave it a little more authority. He drank a beer with it and had a second beer for dessert, and it was while he was drinking the second beer that he realized he hadn’t had a cigarette since morning. He’d reached the top of a rise around nine-thirty and had taken a few minutes to check out the view, referring to his map to determine what mountains he was looking at. Mount Bailey, Mount Thielsen, Black Rock Mountain, Pig Iron Mountain — there were great names and imposing mountains, but he wasn’t confident he was matching them up correctly. Nor did he suppose it mattered much.
And, looking at the mountains, he’d lit the first cigarette of the day. And it had thus far been the last cigarette of the day, and that was strange.
In fact, he’d hardly been smoking at all since he left Roseburg. He’d started out with a carton in his backpack and three loose packs, one of them about half gone when he set out. This was his fourth day on the road, and he hadn’t touched the carton, and he had an unopened pack in his jacket and another pack in his shirt pocket with, let’s see, three cigarettes left in it. Which meant he’d smoked something like a pack and a half in the past four days, and he normally smoked close to twice that much in a day. Two to three packs a day, that’s what he’d been smoking for nearly twenty years.
That he should reduce his cigarette consumption so dramatically was remarkable. When he was running he had several times tried to quit, and he’d managed to cut down some, but at the best of times he never got much under a pack a day. But what was astonishing was that he’d cut down without even knowing it. Except cut down didn’t really say it. Why, he’d virtually stopped altogether.
He took a cigarette and held it between his thumb and forefinger. It felt funny in his hand. He put it in his mouth, took it out, put it back, shrugged, and lit it. He took a puff, inhaled, blew out the smoke and watched it rise to the ceiling.
It tasted all right, but he didn’t seem to want to finish it. He started to force himself to take another puff, then changed his mind and stubbed it out in the ashtray.
Back at the Fair Harbor Inn the owner emerged from the office as Guthrie was heading up the graveled drive. He said, “Well, did you have that chili?”
“I did, and it was real good.”